Keynote: How Network Diversity Drives Innovation

A brief snippet from Ross Dawson’s keynote speech at APIDays conference where he explains how network diversity drives innovation.

Full Transcription: How Network Diversity Drives Innovation

Ross Dawson:

This is a really rich point.
If you look across network studies, at network science,
it is diversity of connections that brings the greatest value.
In innovation it is all about bringing together different connections.
Seeing Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry,
he stated very clearly that his innovation came from bringing together two ideas.
It is true. There are no new ideas,
there only existing ones that are brought together in new ways.
That can happen within a single mind. It is thus the diversity of ideas in your mind
and your ability to connect them creates your individual ability to innovate.
Inside an organization it is the diversity of the people and their perspectives
and their experiences, and the ability to bring those together in different ways
that creates innovation. Something which has not been connected before.
So innovation is fundamentally about getting the diversity, getting the richness,
and bringing things together to be able
to create something that has not been created before.